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On Russian TV, a Straightforward Account Is Startling

MOSCOW — Regular viewers of government-controlled television were treated to a curious sight when they tuned in to the evening news on Saturday.

Sweeping views of the tens of thousands of people who had crowded into a central Moscow square for a sprawling anti-Kremlin protest cut away to close-ups of groups of average citizens chanting, “New elections! New elections!”

“Tens of thousands of people came out to register their disagreement with the results of recent parliamentary elections, which they said were rigged in favor of United Russia,” the ruling party, Aleksei Pivovarov, one of the evening news hosts on government-controlled NTV, announced at the top of the broadcast Saturday.

In short, government television covered the protests much as they had occurred — to the surprise of many.

“They showed me on Channel 1 and said I was an opposition leader, which is already a breakthrough,” said Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister in the 1990s who has not been shown on government-controlled television, save for perhaps in court or handcuffs, for perhaps a decade. “They’re already calling me from Washington and asking what’s going on.”

Indeed, for many it is not clear what exactly is happening in Russia these days, and the shift in television coverage is just one cause of confusion.

For more than a week, Moscow has witnessed some of the largest protests against the Kremlin in years. Yet, until Saturday, most government channels, if they reported on the demonstrations at all, tended to portray protesters as rebels and lawbreakers, with at least one report warning of people arming themselves with improvised bombs.

“In Russia, there is a culture of revolt,” Vladimir Solovyov, a Kremlin-friendly television host, said in an evening news appearance on Rossia 1 last week. “And this culture of revolt ends in bloodshed. In Russia, there is no culture of fighting for your rights within the framework of the law.”

Video

A Day of Protests

Protesters gathered in Moscow to challenge what they called fraudulent elections.

For more than a decade, television news in Russia has been used to support the government of Vladimir V. Putin. Nightly newscasts are typically consumed with the bland minutia of government: Mr. Putin meeting with the minister of transportation or health or education about some problem of the day. Critics of the government, when they get airtime at all, are mostly portrayed as radicals or buffoons.

But the scale of the recent protests, especially on Saturday, seems to have forced the Kremlin to confront the widespread and evident discontent, even on television.

The three main government-controlled channels each led their evening broadcasts on Saturday with reports about the protests. They showed the huge crowds and their anti-Kremlin posters. In interviews, people at the rallies complained about their votes having been stolen and expressed their desire for new elections. Each of the channels also broadcast calls for the ouster of Vladimir Y. Churov, the leader of Russia’s Central Election Commission, an ominous signal about his future employment.

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Some reporters even seemed surprised that so many people could gather in one place peacefully.

“Today’s protest was a lesson for everyone,” said Andrei Medvedev in the evening broadcast of Rossia 1. “It turns out that, to express your dissatisfaction with the authorities, it is possible to gather on a square after getting permission from those same authorities. And to keep order, all you really have to do is give a polite admonition.”

Each of the stations also reported on the smaller demonstrations held in dozens of other large cities.

Notably absent from all television coverage, however, was any mention of Mr. Putin — who is practically never shown in a negative light — though, at the protest, he was denounced more than anyone.

No doubt a major explanation for the shift in coverage lies with heavy penetration of the Internet in Russian society. With reports rocketing through Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, not to mention professional news agencies online, the protest would have been impossible to ignore.

Television journalists themselves might also have influenced the coverage. Several seemed to have attended the protest on their own, including Anton Krasovsky, the host of a political talk show on NTV, who posted photos from the event to his Facebook page.

“To all those who were yelling that there would be blood, who hoped for bodies, for provocations, what did you get?” Mr. Krasovsky wrote. “Here’s to you,” he wrote, then told these detractors to go somewhere unprintable.

Asked, in a telephone interview, about the apparent shift in tone in coverage of the Saturday protest, Mr. Pivovarov from NTV was coy:

“You understand, the news is like a living thing and a living process. It is like life. One day is not the same as another. Everything is flowing and changing.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2011, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: On Russian TV News, in Startling Shift, Straightforward Account of Day’s Events. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe